Mother and daughter embracing while looking out a window
July 17, 2012 is a date that is forever etched into my permanent memory. I will never be able to forget my dad driving out to the week long summer camp I was attending to tell me my mom’s routine kidney stone surgery had ended in sudden cardiac arrest. She had been fine the night before when she talked to him, and fine only 10 minutes before when she sent me a text message saying she would come pick me up from camp on Sunday. My dad told me a short few minutes later, she had to be resuscitated, put on life support, and the doctors were saying she would not survive. I was 12 years old. I couldn’t even begin to imagine my life without my mom. I was terrified and had no idea what was about to come.
Two weeks later she came out of her medically-induced coma and woke up. Four months later she came home from the hospital. Despite this incredibly happy news, we were left completely unprepared for the fact that my mom had sustained a moderate-severe anoxic brain injury from the lack of oxygen during her three cardiac arrests. The woman who came home from the hospital wasn’t the mama who had raised me for 12 years. I didn’t know her nor recognize her. Although my mom was alive, she was still gone. As a kid, I didn’t understand why she wasn’t “my mom,” why she wasn’t the same as she was before.
In the early days, I helped my mom relearn to read, write, walk, talk and eat. She couldn’t do any of these things well when she came home from the hospital. She didn’t know what pizza was or what to do with it. She didn’t understand not to eat the fuzzy part of a kiwi. It took her minutes to come up with a response when we would talk and she would interchange words like pink and fork. She would ask us for a pink with her supper.
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